Cartunesshop.com was the first domain I ever registered.
It began in the fall of 1999, at a time when selling automotive accessories online felt like stepping into unfamiliar territory. eBay was new. Broadband was rare. Most online transactions were still completed by check in the mail. The phrase “information super highway” was not ironic.
The original plan was simple: build an online automotive accessories store to supplement a 12-volt installation business that had grown through dealer relationships across the tri-state area. Inventory was purchased. Equipment was ready. A launch was planned for the 2001 holiday season.
History had other plans.
September 11th changed consumer behavior overnight. Non-essential retail froze. The accessories market stalled. What began as a retail venture pivoted into something entirely different — dealer advertising, digital listings, and eventually the creation of WebGraphicsRus.
The full story of CarTunesShop lives at cartunesshop.com. This is what came next.
The Problem Dealers Had
I had spent years working in and around the automotive business. Dealerships were part of my world long before the web was. I understood how dealers thought and what they needed. What I also understood, by the time the internet started changing everything, was that most of them had no idea what to do with it.
In the early 2000s dealers were being sold on the internet hard. Everyone had a pitch. Build a website, list your inventory, get found online. The problem was that most of what was being offered was either too expensive, too generic, or built by people who had never spent a day on a car lot.
Dealers needed tools that matched how they actually worked. They needed to move inventory fast, present vehicles clearly, and not depend on a vendor who did not understand the business to make a simple update for them.
I understood the business. I taught myself the technology.
Building the Tools
WebGraphicsRus was registered on October 26, 2001. The stack was straightforward — Windows hosting, Active Server Pages, Visual Basic. Not glamorous by today’s standards but it was what worked and what I could build on reliably.
The first tools were practical. Dealer login systems so clients could access their own information without calling me for everything. Vehicle listing templates that presented inventory in a clean, consistent format. Credit application forms that worked online when most dealers were still doing everything on paper.
One of the more useful things I built was the Dynamic Description Creator — the DDC. Writing individual vehicle descriptions for a dealer with a lot full of cars is tedious and inconsistent. The DDC automated that process. You fed it the vehicle details and it generated a clean, structured description. It saved time and kept the listings from looking like they were written by ten different people.
There was also a Flash intro. The Up Bus. Flash was everywhere then and clients expected it. It looked good at the time.
What the Work Actually Looked Like
Most of this was not glamorous work. It was solving real problems for people who needed things to function. A dealer needed their inventory online by Monday. A form needed to stop breaking in Internet Explorer. A listing needed to look right at 800 by 600 resolution because that was still what a lot of people were running.
You learned fast because you had to. There was no Stack Overflow to check. You worked through it, figured it out, and moved on to the next problem.
The clients were real businesses with real pressure on them. That kept the work honest.
How It Wound Down
The tools that made WebGraphicsRus useful in 2001 started becoming unnecessary as the platforms caught up. AutoTrader, Cars.com, and the dealer management systems built by larger vendors absorbed the functions that independent tools used to handle. The market consolidated and the niche got smaller.
Rather than chase a market that was moving toward scale, I moved on to other things. The domain stayed. The work was real and worth documenting.
Why It Is Still Here
WebGraphicsRus is an archive now. The tools are long retired but the history of building them is worth keeping. A lot of what gets called innovation today is just solving the same problems with newer materials. Understanding how those problems were solved the first time around is not nothing.
The dealer work that started here eventually connected to eMaxAds and later to the IT and web support that runs today through PCITService.com. The thread is unbroken even if the tools look completely different.
This is where it started.